Highway 62

Nailing down a canon for any of the popular arts/media (yes, we can argue that science fiction novels are indeed a popular art), however, is a little trickier. I’m thinking of fields that are typically marginalized by academia (who are, of course, the folks doing the canonizing). Let’s look at rock music. Yes, I know: even defining something so sprawling as rock music (which spans the range of rockabilly to punk to progressive rock, not to mention acid rock and electric folk) is a tricky business. But for acceptance into the more mainstream culture, canonization can serve to streamline things and offer folks a representative sample of works without requiring that they know the entire lineage from Robert Johnson down to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I mean, that’d be like forcing folks to gulp down nearly 80 years of continuity before they can properly enjoy the form. Silly, right?

There’s a joke in there, somewhere…

So, anyways, in an ideal world, the concept of a canon helps folks get a grip on the feel of a particular genre. Of course, for comics, it’s a little trickier, since comics are nearly always called a genre, when in fact they are a medium (i.e., a way of expression, form rather than content. Just like novels are a medium and detective novels are a genre subset of a medium.) Superhero comics are a genre, and indeed the dominant genre, so far (so much so that some creators have made entire careers out of trying to take down the genre superiority of its spandex-clad overlords.)

Of course, the downside to canonization is that it’s often used as a tool to elevate the critical examination of a medium, and not the medium itself. Detective fiction can have a canon because there’s critical attention paid to it at the University level and in the realm of professional academia (and of course, the critics that create the canon itself become the overlords, overshadowing the works themselves with their witty and piquant observations.) The critical discourse about the genre becomes more important than the works that actually make up the genre. But that’s the nature of academia, and one of the reasons that I didn’t sign up for the long haul to Ph.D.-hood.

What’s more interesting, as I said above, is the canonization process in any of the popular media that haven’t yet been plundered by grad students and professors desperate to stay relevant in pop-culture yet deliver something that their academic brethren (and sistren) will accept. Because there are previous few academic outlets that study rock music (but there are, to be sure, lots of pretenders to that title), it’s a relatively open field. The canon is only very loosely defined by a thousand thousand “top-100” lists written up by various radio stations and magazines that are desperately trying to sound like they’re at the top of the game and are the gatekeepers to That Which Is Rock. Funny, but most of those lists end up changing a fair amount. In the year 1976, the record of the year (a fair candidate for canonization, I’d argue) as named by Rolling Stone was a Carpenters record. You know. The Carpenters. Saccharine wrapped in marshmallow syrup sweet and sentimental The Carpenters.

That was also the year that Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols came out. You can argue until you’re blue in the face, but Bollocks is squarely within the rock canon (and some would argue near the apex of that particular grouping as well.) Of course, Rolling Stone couldn’t recognize Bollocks for what it was; they were too busy selling CBS records with their ad-space (including Carpenters records). Of course, some twenty five years later, Bollocks rose through the ranks and was rated as the second greatest rock record of all time (nevermind that seven in the top ten were Beatles records, and while they’re good, they’re not that good.) It’s not a simple matter of boosting what’s hot at the time (though that’s part of it) and realizing in hindsight that there are seminal recordings/works that aren’t accepted as such in their time (though that’s part of it as well.)

One of the big reasons why Bollocks was ignored by critics in 1976 is because it was a direct assault on the rock canon of the time. It was the very antithesis of much of what was being propped up by critics as “important” and “significant” and “timely”, like The Carpenters, though the entirety of the “California Mellow Rock” bandwagon can be lumped in there too. It was an anarchic blast of sound, that for all its bluster and Situationist cribbing, was very much a three-chord rock and roll record. It both opposed the mainstream (of rock music, that is) and embraced what made it vital (though you wouldn’t get that from any of the Sex Pistols’ press releases at the time.) Of course, this is just another example of the thesis/antithesis to new thesis (which incorporates both the old thesis and its antithesis to form a new thesis (i.e., a new mainstream.)

For instance, let’s take Watchmen. When it first came out, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and you still had ads for Hostess fruit pies in comics, it was revolutionary (Watchmen, not Hostess Fruit Pies). We’d seen creators begin to treat the superheroes that they were writing as human beings, not simply as two-dimensional demigods (and that was something that’d been brewing in the mainstream of superhero comics since Fantastic Four by my reckoning, but your mileage may vary), but nobody had pulled it off in the way that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had. These weren’t superheroes in any traditional fashion. These were people (in some cases, relatively messed-up people) who put on masks and fought crime (and changed the world in ways that they hadn’t expected.) Human motivations came before secret origins. And it was dark. Grim, even. Not typical superhero fare.

And then it was successful (though not so much when it first came out as some folks seem to remember.) It stirred up a lot of discussion in terms of how it confronted the superhero mainstream. It was the antithesis of the regular spandex gallery for a time.

Then it got absorbed by the mainstream. The glossiest (or grittiest, depending on how you look at it) surface attributes of Watchmen were seized upon by a bunch of not nearly as creative folks who thought that they could do dark superheroes right, thus unleashing the age of big guns, broken spines and relentlessly (yeah, laughably) dark superhero comics. The antithesis had become integrated into a new thesis. One that we’re still recovering from.

So, why have I wandered far afield and likely bored you into oblivion? Oh yes, canonization in the popular arts. When it came out in 1986, I doubt that you’d have been able to convince too many mainstream comics readers that Watchmen was a special piece of work that would go on to the canon of superhero comics certainly (if not comics as a whole). There were some critics, and a handful of creators who noted such, but the marketplace/readership as a whole was pretty much still enthralled by The Man of Steel revamps, Uncanny X-Men and The Dark Knight Returns (okay, that one got a lot of attention, and rightfully so). Nobody saw Watchmen coming, and the impact it left was genuine and lasting, far more so than any crossover or blockbuster event of the time (but for the above-noted exception).

I know that Watchmen left a big impact on me (after I got to read the first three issues as a piece and not individually, as I’d found ‘em kinda baffling at first pass). But so did a lot of other stuff that I remember fondly from the time. Strikeforce Morituri comes to mind. So do books like The Wasteland and Slash Maraud and a bunch of others. I loved ‘em dearly, and still feel the urge to hunt through the old shortboxes and track ‘em down again, seeing if they hold up. Books like that certainly entered into my own personal canon of comics, but I’d be hard-pressed to recommend them entry into the Comics Canon that we’d theoretically be offering up to people who didn’t know a single thing about comics.

Maybe my naturally conservative side is showing (no, really, I’m a timid and tepid fellow; ask anyone) but people who go around talking up things like “definitive runs” and “one for the ages” and “instant classics” are generally talking up works that will be forgotten in relatively short order. Definitive works are few and far-between. They challenge the assumptions inherent in whatever genre (and even media) they represent (or, in some cases, assault). Talking about a book like, say, The Ultimates as a canonical (superhero, much less comic) text is 1) jumping the gun by about seventeen years and 2) not examining the text closely. You’d do better arguing the inclusion of The Authority (which, even though it may be a bit premature, had a sufficient impact on the superhero genre to get it in the running.)

We can’t look at the books coming out today with a sufficient critical distance to really evaluate whether or not they’re going to make the cut into the Comics Canon (assuming that such a thing actually exists, or that people want it to.) What is omnipresent and undeniably great today may instead be revealed as simply overhyped, or maybe solid work, but proves not to possess any real staying power. Consequently, books that are ignored or simply under everyone’s radar in 2004 will be spoken of in hushed and reverent whispers in 2020. Assuming that we’re all still talking about comics then. While the Carpenters are big this year, the Sex Pistols won the race (at least this round) by having a real aesthetic impact instead of merely being high-selling fluff.

And no, I’m not handing out any predictions as to what of this or last year’s crop will actually manage to prove itself over time. Massive talent aside, it’s not likely to be any of the big events. No shock there. Maybe something like DC: The New Frontier will go the distance (it’s a pretty good contender, though the last issue will be what seals the deal, if anything). Planetary (I know, it’s not exactly a new book, but some more issues will come out this year, right?) could make it, depending on how it concludes. Maybe the joke will be on all of us and Richard Dragon will set itself apart with a soul-rending tale of loss and redemption. Sleeper stands a good chance to carve itself a niche, should more people actually read it and buy it (you folks know that you only have a window of about three months to buy the trades and have DC notice it and think there’s demand, right?). Granted, all the above are squarely in the superhero arena. I’m not qualified to judge what in the independent/comix field will even have a hope of attaining classic status.

Of course, I wouldn’t suggest that people read things just because they’ll be appreciated in twenty years. Appreciate what’s good today and support those books wholeheartedly, not because they’ll be hallowed classics, but because they’re worth your time, money and effort.